Putting on my tin-foil hat, let's see: Zoom's CEO is a Chinese national, Zoom's software is a security disaster and (until recently) data was streamed through Chinese servers. That looks like a pretty succesful spying operation by those semi-cooked-Bat-eating-virus-spreading characters, right?

Obligatory embrace, extend and extinguish. Wether you subscribe to that or not, as an ol' timer I can't help but feel suspicious. Once they have put their entire customer base on O365 etc., what's going to feed the money-printing-machine? They will probably try to squeeze every last cent out of their customer base with SaaS (the new lock-in) and "integrated services" (more lock-in) but that is finite. And with that on the horizon the Linux & F/OSS eco-system starts looking mighty interesting.

There are many problems with Poettering and Sievers:

1) they don't seem to care care about the Community
2) they don't seem to want to interact with the Community
3) they don't seem to want to have a discussion about the many problems and concerns the Community has voiced about systemd
4) it takes no other than Linus himself to force Kay Sievers to get his act together and fix his crap (the "systemd kernel debug" story) and there's another one where Linus orders Sievers again to fix more crap (the "let's *not* read 1 byte at a time" story)
5) they make bad design decisions and consequently write bad software: let's do binary log files and too bad if your journal goes corrupt. We'll just delete it and move on. Given their employer, how is that anywhere near "Enterprise"?!
6) they ignore the Unix/Linux mantra: do one thing and do it well. Now go take a look at the systemd design and how massive that PID 1 kitchensink is. That's a SystemdOMGNucleairZombiesShock waiting to happen.

Why did Red Hat Engineering let it get to this? It's not like this story is beneficial to Red Hat in more than one way. Death threats are of course insane and have no place in our Community. However, the underlying frustration and anger because of their abrasive my-way-or-the-highway attitude and blatant disregard for the Community is hardly surprising. It would not be a bad idea for Red Hat Engineering to reassign Poettering, Sievers et al to work on projects that have no Community interaction nor impact or at least replace their current PHB with someone vastly more capable to reign in those ego's and put an end to this epic amount of Stupid.

Excellent news. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Starbucks and all those other euro-tax avoiding organizations should be forced to pay taxes where they sell their products. I hope that the EU for once does something that benefits Europeans and return billions to the EU economy. Not play and relay but pay to play.

The tricks that those Transfer Pricing consultants from the big tax advisory firms pull have gone way too far. It's time they are reigned in. And their customers should be hit where it hurts most. Next the EU should create new tax regulations that at least 50% of the revenues from foreign designed/manufactured products/services should be spent in the country where the sale of said products/services took place. With regulations like that, extreme globalization, dangerous trade deficits, evil transfer pricing schemes and billions in off-shore havens doing nothing will become a thing of the past.

Imagine what those billions of avoided euro-taxes in off-shore tax havens could have done for the EU economy.

Thank you for pointing that out. It would be great if sysadmins and vendors fixed their NTP config. Unfortunately i's not only NTP that gets abused. The script kiddies also use open DNS servers that do recursive searches. And I'm sure there are more ways kindly offered by ignorant sysadmins and vendors who just don't care. Just google for "TP-Link recursive DNS" to get an idea. The solution is to force vendors to fix recursive DNS and NTP on their Internet facing boxes (why stop there, just "disallow anything from WAN" by default) and make them liable for the default config. Educate and poke sysadmins to fix their badly configured crap if they do not want to get blocked by their ISP or upstream. Force local ISPs to drop packets with a non-local src IP address and block the idiot that sends those packets. And finally add to Spamhaus the IP addresses/ranges of idiots who just don't care. Let's see how quickly they fix their crap once their boss figures out he can no longer send email to the cute-cat-pic mailing list.

There are way more Internet users outside of the US many of them with faster Internet at cheaper rates. The two biggest Internet exchanges are in Frankfurt (DE-CIX) and Amsterdam (AMS-IX) and in terms of traffic peaks and traffic transfers they leave the US as a tiny dot in their rear-view mirror. The biggest e-commerce market in the world when measured by the amount spent per capita? The UK, in 2010. The e-commerce market in absolute numbers in China will at least equal but probably surpass the US in 2013. And that's only one of the BRIC countries. Now add Japan (Rakuten) and Europe and it's easy to see that the Internet is global and definitely not US centric. Anyone who thinks that follies like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram make up the majority of the Intertubes is probably American, thinks Fox News tells the truth and has never left his/her country :-) The same goes for those fine optical cables transporting all those cat videos. Most cables are not owned by US companies. And most cables are not even near the US. US companies may lease fibre in those cables but that's not the same. Have a look at all submarine cables here: http://submarine-cable-map-2013.telegeography.com/ Building your own Internet is a matter of finding the cash, hiring one of those cable ships and put your cable between point A and B. Next thing you will do is hook it up to an Internet exchange at which point it will start to transport traffic from the US (the NSA, cat videos) and to the US (the NSA backup, when posting, tweeting, tumblering and instagramming about those cat videos). The only place where the Internet is US centric is in regulatory control: ICANN. It's time ICANN got replaced by an extension of the IETF located outside of the US in a neutral place like Switzerland. ICANN can keep .com, and .mil but anything else should get transferred to the new organization. And no I will not hold my breath for that to happen any time soon.

There is this neat concept called "peering". A massive amount of Google's traffic does not go through public ports on Internet Exchanges. Instead it's delivered to Google caching nodes hosted at ISPs around the world and delivered from those caching nodes directly to the ISPs customer. This saves a few zillion petabytes in bandwidth (and dollars). By the way, it looks like the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, AMS-IX, has overtaken DE-CIX as the biggest Internet Exchange in the world.

Anything pro-GMO should be subject to extreme scrutiny and is probably Monsanto playing the field. This pro-GMO guy is from a Spanish university and it's obvious that Spain is pretty far up the creek with a gigantic unemployment rate and staggering debt which surely had an impact on his university's funding. So where is the Monsanto link? Did anyone follow the money? Who funded their pro-GMO research? GMO is a bad idea and Monsanto's GMO patents and their litigation are in an evil scale of their own.

"Since then it has been very public with Oracle Linux"

Ah you're maybe referring to the CentOS-like clone they created from Red Hat's source packages. Once they spun their isos and slapped together a 3 page website they went after Red Hat's customers saying "their" so called unbreakable Linux is better than Red Hat's. That same unbreakable Linux which is based *entirely* on Red Hat's source packages. That's pretty evil in my book. Add how they are shielding off MySQL bugs and development and what they did to OpenSolaris and you get a pretty clear picture of a dinosaur-going-the-way-of-the-dodo who's trashing anything Open while giving in to its insatiable hunger for ginormous license fees and sending ginormous invoices to misguided customers for their $1000-suit "consultants".

It makes total sense to migrate to MariaDB, Percona, EnterpriseDB or PostgreSQL as fast as you can. While you are at it replace BerkeleyDB with LMDB. Last time I looked OpenLDAP, Postfix, OpenDKIM and other projects already support it. And it's faster and more reliable than BerkeleyDB too.

The only way Oracle will (hopefully) make some attempt to become a proper member of our Community is when they feel it where it hurts most: revenue streams. So slam the door in the face of that pompous Oracle rep, don't renew the license(s), drink the F/OSS Cool Aid and enjoy the view.

Anyone remember that a long time member of the Community used the phrase "Code Monkey"? It's been a few years but hearing this version I wish people would just first take a deep breath, count to ten and then focus on the things that really matter...

As a Fedorian I welcome everybody from Ubuntu who seek an alternative. Fedora is a free cutting edge distro. The good side: no ads and other commercial ties making *you* the product or that unity abomination. The downside: Fedora is void of any (potentially) patent encumbered or non-free software so you will need to make a bit of an effort to get all those codecs, flash and non-free apps etc installed on your shiny new Fedora powered box. It's worth it though. Even GNOME3 grows on you once you have slapped some sanity into it by installing a bunch of extensions. If you are not interested in Fedora, there are a ton of different distributions to choose from. Head over to distrowatch.com to get an idea how many there are.

Really De Icaza, posting as an AC? How's the funding going? Did Microsoft find you a new Baystar yet?

And why would that be? Seems all I hear from those Mono lovers is that those who are opposed to Mono and De Icaza's little ploy have no clue. Yet I am still waiting on what the right clue is. Why is there no patent threat in Mono? Why is it safe to use? Why will I never be sued by Microsoft when I deploy/sell Mono crap? Give me proof and nothing but proof. Thus far all I hear is a thundering silence.

De Icaza may have gotten that license and it seems to be all about Mono but if you read their plans then you can see that De Icaza, as one can expect from a good little Microsoft footsoldier, is moving towards closed, proprietary applications for iPhone and Android. With Microsoft already targeting Android phone vendors what do you think what will happen if vendors ship Mono based applications created with De Icaza's Trojan Horses or sell Mono based apps in their app stores? It's all about getting more Microsoft Intellectual Property on Android phones so Microsoft can continue & further expand their shake down or sue for (alleged) patent infringement. It's all about making sure that Microsoft can say to potential hardware partners: Android is *not* free, there is a monetary (legal/IP) cost attached and this is why we are cheaper. Microsoft provides the bullets (via Attachmate this time) and De Icaza as usual bends over for Microsoft and does as he is told. This announcement should be a wake up call to the entire Android Community that Microsoft is trying very hard to make everybody who's doing anything with Android bleed till they drop dead.

I don't know how many here fly an average of 200 times a year but that is a lot. Having flown for decades my record was 200+ European flights and about 50 (twice a week) flights from Amsterdam to the US. People I met with a lot actually thought that I lived there where "there" was e.g. London, Paris, New York etc. At some point you become the guy Up In The Air so I knew it was time to get out. That and the jet lag that never left. He did it for 29 years. That's pretty amazing.